How to send a mail merge with Excel using Gmail

If you have your contacts and their email addresses saved in an Excel spreadsheet, it’s easy to send a mail merge to them with GMass. The following quick example will show you how.

First, we start with our Excel spreadsheet, in this case one with a few customers of Ted, our fictional shopkeeper.

An Excel spreadsheet on your computer, with three customer names and their email addresses.

Now we want to import this into Google Sheets. To do that, make sure you are logged into your Google account, and then go to Google Sheets. (In our example, it will start with no sheets; in your case, you may have previous spreadsheets already there.)

Google Sheets, with no sheets in it yet.

Click on the folder icon on the right to open the File Picker.

Click this folder icon to open the File Picker.

This will bring up the Google Sheets File Picker, allowing you to pick your Excel file to upload. Click on Upload.

Click on Upload to select your Excel file.

The screen will change, asking you to either drag or select a file from your computer. In our example, we’ll select one. Click on the blue “Select a file from your computer” button.

About to select our Excel spreadsheet after clicking here.

From here, pick your Excel spreadsheet from the file manager on your computer.

This will then be uploaded to Google Sheets and converted into a new Google Sheet spreadsheet. However, before we can use it in GMass, we have to edit it, very slightly and quickly. That’s because this spreadsheet has text above the columns that hold the FirstName, LastName, and Email fields, and that will introduce an error. So, you will need to just make sure there is nothing above these columns. Let’s do that by selecting the two rows above and just deleting them. Do that by holding down shift, clicking on the row number, 1 and then row 2, which will select both these rows:

Two rows that we want to delete are selected.

Select Edit from the menu, and drop down to select “Delete rows 1 – 2”. About to delete rows 1 and 2.

Our quickly cleaned-up sheet should now looks like this and is ready to use with GMass:

Sheet is now ready to use with GMass.

Now go to Gmail and click on GMass’s red spreadsheet button near the top to connect to an email list in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

Click the spreadsheet button to connect to your Google sheet.

This will bring up a window allowing you to select the Google Sheets spreadsheet you want to use to populate the email addresses in your mail merge.
The GMass spreadsheet connection window.

From this window, select a spreadsheet from the dropdown.

Selecting the spreadsheet we just uploaded into Google Sheets from Excel.

[Note: in this simplified example, there is only one spreadsheet listed. For regular users of Google Sheets, there may be many sheets to select from. Make sure you choose the correct one.]

Then, once you have selected a spreadsheet, the “CONNECT TO SPREADSHEET” button will turn red. Click on the “CONNECT TO SPREADSHEET” button.[Note: For this tutorial, we are not going to address the Optional Settings.]
Click the red bar button to connect GMass to the Google Sheets spreadsheet.

The screen will change at this point. The GMass Google Sheets chooser window will be gone, and now you’ll see a Gmail Compose Window is open. In the To field, the email addresses of the contacts from your Google Sheet have now been populated.

A new Gmail compose window, with email addresses from our spreadsheet.

From here, you can send out your email as you normally would in GMass. For example, you can send out a sales email with the GMass personalized greeting feature, as shown below.
Ready to send out individualized emails with GMass.

Tip: Because you’ve used a spreadsheet that indicated the first name and last name of each email recipient, GMass will intelligently personalize the greeting for all of them. For example, the second recipient, Brandon Walsh, will have an email that starts, “Dear Brandon,”. Without using a spreadsheet to indicate first and last names to GMass, only Gmail addresses would automatically use the first and last names of the recipient. That’s a nice advantage of using spreadsheets: everyone can receive a personalized email!

Now, just click on the red GMass button to send out the individual emails.

Ready to send out, just need to click GMass…

You’ll get a message telling you “You did it!”. Now let’s check that they went out as planned. Go to your Sent folder in Gmail.Our three emails from the spreadsheet have gone out!

It worked!
Of course, the real power comes when you have a large number of names and email addresses in your Excel file. Within a few minutes, you can be sending each of them a personalized email with GMass.

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18 Replies to “How to send a mail merge with Excel using Gmail”

This is great! I now use Excel, Word, and Outlook for sending mass mail. One benefit is that I can use the following to personalize the person(s) receiving the email:
Good morning “Pierre & Suzanne”. There is much merit in using this combination when dealing with either clients, church or clubs.
Can one do this is GMass? The program looks promising. Thanks.

I tried to send a test GMass campaign and it do not appear to personalize the peoples names for each recipient. It just says Hello {Name},
Another thing which bothers me is – it went to the SPAM folder. I thied the same email address without gmass and without {}, the same text and it did not go to the SPAM in that case.

Please contact our support team through http://gmass.co/g/support. Please include a screenshot of your draft along with the top part of your spreadsheet (include the header row and a few rows below it) to our support team.

Yes, you may close your spreadsheet. GMass does not need the spreadsheet to be open to use it since you’ll be linking the spreadsheet initially. When you link a spreadsheet to a campaign, whether you’re sending now or scheduling a future campaign, that linking tells GMass which spreadsheet to use and retrieves data from that sheet for your mail merge.

Can this be done as a blind CC so it doesn’t appear to be a mass emailing?

Also, can I insert a specific subject line for each recipient? In my case I am offering to buy their rental property and want to put the address of that rental property in the subject line…they are more likely to open the email if they see that it actually pertains to them.

My company is switching from Outlook to Gmail. I use email merge on a regular basis, and merge more than just the greeting. For example, if we are holding an event with various sessions, I will email a reminder to all participants that says something like this:

Dear {John}, Thank you for registering for session {3} and session {6} at the whatever event it is. You have chose {chicken} for lunch.

Can I still do this with GMass? Am I able to simply pick fields from the spreadsheet like I can when using a Word doc and Excel to send my email merge?

Glad you like GMass. Regarding your sent folder, you can actually create a non-obtrusive text (that’s unique) to be used only in your campaigns not on your replies or regular emails. Something like _______________________________________ (a bunch of underscores) and create a filter to search in sent messages to automatically delete them.